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Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
121–127 of 127 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#122It's probably useful to un-read Clean Code, though I don't really have a recommendation for a good replacement. The replacement is something like "Make a lot of mistakes and develop good taste based on your experience." If you're interested in performance, you can read https://algorithmica.org/ and https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf
algorithmica.org; only if you can read Russian, as the English version is WIP and the main version they work on is the Russian one.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#123Maybe not so obvious, but - Stephen King’s “On writing”. When I read it ages ago, found funny how writing the books is similar to writing the code.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#124I’ll have two recommendations. 1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point. 2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is go…
Totally agree about fiction. Hadley Wickham's textbooks were influential in my path to become a data scientist. The writing is so good. I follow him on Goodreads and he is a voracious fiction reader.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#125It's probably useful to un-read Clean Code, though I don't really have a recommendation for a good replacement. The replacement is something like "Make a lot of mistakes and develop good taste based on your experience." If you're interested in performance, you can read https://algorithmica.org/ and https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf
algorithmica.org; only if you can read Russian, as the English version is WIP and the main version they work on is the Russian one.
The English version is a best-in-class English among those that are free.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#126Late to this but as I don't see it suggested, then the following page can really come in handy when wanting book suggestions from HN.
I have no affiliation.
Re: Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
#127"A Philosophy of Software Design" by Stanford's John Ousterhout is excellent. It is quite concise (about 190 pages), but in my opinion, it includes all the essential information that the other books in that category would teach you. It leaves out a lot of cruft that over the years turned out to be non-issues (code styling, problems that come with object oriented programming, etc.) but occasionally - when the topic is…
> That being said, I wish there was a single consistent resource[1] that summarizes truly modern software design philosophy in the sense that it leaves the object orientation inspired ideas behind that did not turn out to be useful and focusses on typed functional programming. Maybe with examples in Typescript and Rust.
Not Rust or TS, but i found Java to Kotlin a decent book which provides refactoring of java OOP to more functional patterns. One of the authors Nat Pryce was big into OOP design and was also a co-author of famous book Growing Object Oriented Software by Tests.